MATtam 69

Manto Arte Temporanea | Temporary Art Manto
short exhibitions in found spaces

Sala Attilio Regolo del Giardino Segreto | Palazzo Te | Mantova

Silvia Zagni

Ecce Ovo

Sunday March 24th 2024
only between 10:30 AM and 12:30 PM

The work I present is an installation of sound-producing ceramic eggs that, with the help of the audience, come to life in an angelic chant of birds: ancestral sounds, natural gurgles and human breaths contribute to driving away spirits as in the most ancient primitive traditions, where the magic of the raw material was united with the spiritual mystery of the cosmic man. Here, the egg, primal symbol of myth, becomes a mytheme or archetype.

Silvia Zagni was born in Bologna in 1971; she works and lives in the castle village of Elle in Rioveggio, on the Bolognese Apennines, halfway between Bologna and Florence. A place with an ancient history where there is a quarry from which the artist extracts the purest stoneware, the finest siliceous sand, primordial elements indispensable for her artistic research based on ancient ceramic techniques.
Silvia's art, while nourished by exquisitely contemporary languages, comes from afar and is intimately connected to the nature in which she has been immersed for over twenty years. Her creations are a constant response to the intimate need to make existing forms converse with imagined forms. An art that is a suspended bridge between her sensitivity and the sublime natural beauties of this territory which, in a very distant past, was the backdrop of a sea evaporated overnight.

"The time of the origin resonates with voices that move depths and mysteries, in the arc that connects forms to unspecified and expanded spaces towards the universal." Donata Negrini

Co-production with